


The Catalyst

by hangthestars



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, M/M, Multi, Post-Mass Effect 3
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-09
Updated: 2013-07-09
Packaged: 2017-12-18 05:43:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/876275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hangthestars/pseuds/hangthestars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-ME3, Destroy-esque ending. Everybody lives. After sleeping for six months, Shepard wakes to find the galaxy a little less than perfect and her brain not quite the way she left it. While reacquainting herself with the universe she nearly died to save and reuniting with her friends, Shepard struggles with balancing the time off she's earned and the work she still feels she has left to do. She finds herself sharing her mind with an unexpected guest who claims to know the real story behind the Crucible and the Catalyst.</p>
<p>Third person, present tense. Shepard is a mostly Paragon, bisexual female Vanguard colonist war hero. Pairings, warnings and tags will be updated as I go. Explicit language and sexual material is expected to show up eventually.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Pairings, warnings and tags will be updated as I go. Explicit language and sexual material is expected to show up eventually.

"---Anderson?"

He's gone. He's been going, and Shepard stubbornly pretends for another second that he isn't. She pretends that he's resting, because it's easier, and she needs some easy right now. Thirty seconds, maybe. Just... just half a minute. 

Her stomach is bleeding sluggishly; by the time she glances down, her hand is covered in blood, and she's only vaguely aware of it. Everything hurts. She doesn't have the energy to be more affected by one hurt than another.

Sixteen seconds after Anderson closes his eyes, there's Hackett's voice.

_"Shepard? Commander."_

Sixteen is enough. (Everything hurts, so nothing hurts, nothing is allowed to hurt.) She pushes. "I..." God. "What do you need me to do?"

_"Nothing's happening. "_

She can't stand up, so she crawls. Only option. She can't breathe.

_"The Crucible's not firing. It's gotta be something on your end."_

She hits the floor with a grunt. If she's lucky, Hackett didn't hear that. She looks up; the console in front of her is the only thing she can think about. Other thoughts won't enter her head. Stubborn. She's stubborn even when she can't breathe, and her body's version of autopilot says _you're not finished, you're not allowed to fall over_.

_"Commander Shepard!"_

"I don't see... I'm not sure how to..." She reaches up for the console and misses. She's lightheaded. Her brain wants to keep trying, but her arms won't cooperate.

When she hits the floor again, she can't get her thoughts together long enough to...

"Commander Shepard."

It's a voice she's heard in her dreams for years. She must be dead, if Ashley Williams is talking to her, kneeling down beside her, reaching out to touch. If Shepard was a touch more lucid, she would give real attention to the fact that Ashley is blue and transparent, flickering like a hologram.

"Ash."

Ashley shakes her head. When she touches Shepard, there's a jolt of static electricity, but her touch is solid enough to take her limp hand and raise it from the ground. Shepard must be dead, she must be dead because the hurting is gone... With Ashley's support, she pushes herself up again and lets herself be guided to the console.

"Ashley, I---"

"I am the Catalyst," Ashley corrects gently---and beside her own voice is the mechanical hum of a VI, the voices of men, women and children. "I have been waiting. Let me help you."


	2. Chapter 2

Shepard dreams of Ashley and the dead. _I am the Catalyst_ , Ash whispers. _I have been waiting._ She's led by the hand through the gray forest, transparent grass crushing beneath her feet. Whenever Shepard tries to linger by the shadows, Ashley tightens the grip on her hand and keeps her moving, even as the voices in the darkness pull at her. Some are louder than others. Some are crying. When Shepard tries to ask questions, her mouth feels like it's full of stones. She doesn't know how much time is passing.

The voices get louder, until they're nearly shouting. After a years (or hours) of trekking through a forest with no end, Ashley abruptly stops and turns on her. 

"We are the Catalyst," she says firmly. "Shepard? Shepard. _Shepard---!_ "

* * *

Everything is blurry.

"Shepard!"

" _Major_. Please, sit down."

"She's awake, Dr. Chakwas, I---"

A surprised noise. A quiet sob. Then, a professional voice. "She may not be for very long."

Another sob, this time from a man. "Her eyes are open."

Gently. "Coma patients wake very slowly, Kaidan. Be patient."

She doesn't recognize either voice. Two minutes later, she goes back to sleep.

* * *

"You can't go back yet," Ashley says plainly. "We are the Catalyst."

Shepard doesn't know what that means, but she can't feel her tongue, so she can't ask questions. She's sitting in the grass, and when she touches it with her bare hand, it feels like nothing underneath her. Ashley has her arms crossed over her chest, and she looks blurry.

Ashley crouches and gives Shepard a jolt when she touches the underside of her chin. "You touched me. You need to be alive so I can touch you. But you can't go back yet."

Shepard groans. She's vaguely aware of her heartbeat: first that it's beating very slowly, then that it's speeding up. Her lung---crumpled, damaged, out of use---fills with air and blood. Her head hurts.

"I dropped you." Ashley sounds sad. "I'm sorry."

Shepard doesn't know what that means, either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pairings, warnings and tags will be updated as I go. Explicit language and sexual material is expected to show up eventually.


	3. Chapter 3

Truly waking isn't what she would have expected, if Shepard knew to expect anything. First, she's alone. Second, she feels grungy. Third, there are tubes sticking out of her in some really uncomfortable places. Fourth, her mind is way ahead of her in the functionality department, and so while she can't move her arms and legs at first, and her tongue is heavy, she's irritated by the inability to just hop out of bed.

An hour later, a nurse comes to check on her and weeps openly when Shepard says that she'd like to get out of bed sometime this year. The nurse pages everyone in the hospital, and Shepard finds herself trying to assure him. The tears won't stop coming, and the poor man won't stop crying long enough to answer any of Shepard's questions.

Shepard is surrounded by medics she doesn't recognize. She's in a surprisingly clean hospital that she doesn't know. None of her friends are close enough to come running, and there's a buzzing in the back of her mind, faint as a nearly forgotten idea. She assumes someone will explain it, eventually, when they stop fussing.

* * *

By the time someone Shepard _knows_ actually appears, it's been a couple of days. All of her tubes and needles have been taken out, and now that those days have actually passed, she's privately grateful that none of her crew gets to see her with a feeding tube and a catheter. She still has her dignity to maintain, after all.

Liara's alone when she visits. She shows up in the middle of dinner (which Shepard is grateful for, because _hospital food_ ) and sobs before she says hello, hugging before Shepard has the chance to comment.

"Hey---hey, it's fine." Shepard rubs the back of Liara's shoulder. It's less awkward, somehow, than the nurse; of course _Liara_ is crying. "It's okay. I'm all right."

"I'm sorry." Liara pulls back before Shepard thinks to let her go, wiping her eyes like her tears are an unfortunate inconvenience. "You're the one hurt and I'm the one crying. I promised myself that I wouldn't."

"It's okay," Shepard repeats, reaching out to squeeze her shoulder. "I'm fine. A little creaky, but I'm fine. No one will tell me anything. Doc said they were ordered to wait until... well, until one of you showed up." And if the way she says it is any indication, Shepard's not happy to be kept in the dark for days on end, as if she's too fragile to handle it. 

She gives Liara a once-over, trying to guess what to expect before she's told. Liara looks tired. She has a scar over her temple, and a chunk of one of her hair tentacles is missing. She could stand to do a load of laundry, too, if the state of her jacket is any indication, and---

"Am I still waking up or are you _pregnant_?"

"What? Oh." Liara looks down and protectively touches her stomach. Shepard hasn't exactly been around many pregnant women in a while, but if asari are anything like humans, she's maybe... seven months? Eight? "I was going to lead up to that," she says lamely.

"I think it kind of led up to itself." Shepard smirks a little. "So... I guess I've been out for a while, huh?"

"Yeah." Liara shifts her weight on the bed. She's calmed, her voice back to a familiar tone: soft, a little academic and detatched. Comforting, for someone who knows her. "It's been six months, Shepard."

Shepard lets out a breath she doesn't remember holding. Only six. After all the secrecy and seeing Liara's belly, she'd been expecting at least a _year_. Reaching out, she gently touches Liara's stomach and asks, "So this is...?"

"Six months," Liara repeats. "Exactly six, actually. I'm sorry, I came here to fill you in, not make it all about me, I just don't know exactly where to start." 

Shepard waves it off. "Why don't I ask questions, Liara? And you can tell me what I want to know." She knows she doesn't want a casualty list. Maybe she doesn't even want to know what happened just yet, not when she's painfully aware that she can't get out of bed without help because the muscles in her legs are wasted. Something simple and ostensibly happy is a good start. "So who's the father? Did you and Feron...?"

"Goddess, no." Liara scratches the back of her neck. "You have to understand, Shepard, war... does things to people. It makes you take chances you might not otherwise take, with people you didn't expect, and---"

"Liara." Shepard reaches over to take her hand. "I promise not to get mad if it's Kaidan. Kind of. Mostly. I might get a _little_ mad---"

" _Goddess, no!_ I would never," Liara interrupts with mild horror. "It's _Javik_."

Shepard can't help it. She laughs, just for a second. "Javik? I didn't know you two were that close."

"We aren't. Sort of. We were speaking---academically, of course---about what would happen if he survived, what he would do next and if he wanted to try reviving his race, with cloning maybe, and we decided to..."

"Embrace eternity?"

"For science. If everyone wasn't so busy rebuilding, the asari would be scandalized. It's _very_ rare to have children before about three hundred and fifty," Liara admits, matter-of-fact. "That I mated with the last living Prothean in case he died in battle and didn't get a chance to later helps."

"There's usually a baby boom right after a war, though. They can't be _that_ surprised." Shepard gives her food and obligatory poke with a fork before pushing it away from her for good, moving the tray to give them both more space.

Liara shakes her head. "Asari can control when we have children. We don't conceive the way most races do. Most people wouldn't choose to have an infant in the aftermath of war. Our childhoods are so long, we'll have little ones underfoot for almost two decades. We like to have baby booms in peacetime so it's not an issue."

"I see." Shepard nearly forgets there are other things to talk about. Shouldn't her head be fuzzier? She's not a doctor, but she's known veterans who were in comas for months. She shouldn't be coherent, but here she is, having this conversation like she hasn't been asleep so long. But as long as they're talking about children... "What about the krogan? I assume they're _booming_."

Liara sighs in relief. "They are. Thankfully, they waited to do it until they got home. I like having Wrex around, but I don't like arguing with him about making tiny krogan babies all over Earth. When it was all over, the techs made sure the relay in the Aralakh System was fixed _first_."

"It was broken?"

"The Crucible broke it." It's strange, hearing Liara speak so easily about things that would have been urgent and important the last time Shepard was up and running. "It used the relays to get the beam to the rest of the galaxy. None of them _exploded_ , but they all broke down. Nothing we couldn't fix, though; we already have a few back up, and we're working on the rest. We're fortunate that we can make one-way trips as long as one of the relays is operational, or we'd be doing it the old fashioned way."

"You sound really... I don't know. Used to it." Shepard isn't sure if she's uncomfortable because she feels left behind, or if it's just the way Liara talks. She draws up her legs and rests her chin on her knees, deciding _not_ to decide yet.

"I'm a very busy information broker," Liara says tiredly. "Conflict is _much_ easier to manage than peace when your trade is intel. I'm trying to supply refugees while keeping the mercs under control. I had hoped everything would be as easy as the first few weeks, but life is moving again. They want to go back to work."

"So what did the Crucible actually _do_? I didn't get to see it." She considers mentioning Ashley-who-was-the-Catalyst and is reminded of the buzzing in the back of her head. Like suddenly hearing a machine that's been on and ignored for hours, Shepard is momentarily distracted, twitching like she can see the source, as if it isn't in her brain already. Hn.

Liara pauses, and apparently decides Shepard's twitching isn't worth commenting on at the moment. "It... killed Reapers. It hit Harbinger from orbit and spread to the others like a spark. It was _amazing_ to see, Shepard. I wish you could have watched." 

There's sadness and pity in Liara's voice, and Shepard touches her hand. "I'll watch the vids. As long as it worked, that's all I care about. And people are okay? Can the dead Reapers still indoctrinate people?"

"If they can, it doesn't show. None of the clean up crews are reporting anything strange. Thank the Goddess, I don't know what we would have done if they still could. People are having regular checkups to make sure, but..." Liara's welling up again, and doing a much better job of hiding it this time. She squeezes Shepard's hand until it hurts. "We did it. All that work, all that worrying, and we actually _did it_ , Shepard. _You_ did it. I was so afraid that I would get a call these last six months hearing that you died after all, and---"

"Commander Shepard?" A nurse interrupts, and Liara seems relieved, keeping her head bowed and collecting herself. "I was sent to come get you for physical therapy, if that's okay?"

"I'm actually talking to Doctor T'Soni---"

"That's okay," Liara insists, gesturing dismissively. "I'll go get you some new clothes and your omni-tool, Shepard. I'll be back when you're finished. I have to say, the hospital gown isn't very attractive."

Shepard scrunches her nose. "Thanks, Liara. I was really concerned with that."

Liara squeezes her hand one more time. "I will be back. I _promise_."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pairings, warnings and tags will be updated as I go. Explicit language and sexual material is expected to show up eventually.


End file.
